


The Mastermind

by ModernWizard



Series: Alison Wonderland [12]
Category: Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who: Scream of the Shalka
Genre: Alison POV, Alison masterminds the Master, Alison uses her powers for good, And his stupidly expressive eyebrows, And his stupidly luscious mouth, Fascism, Fascists, Gen, He is unprepared for Alison, Him and his stupidly large eyes, Latin, Latin fairy tales, Lust, Nazis, Postcolonialism, She has a gift for mastering Masters, The Master POV, The Spymaster WUVS Alison, The Spymaster and his four aspects, The Spymaster talks to himselves, The Spymaster tries to scare up some excitement on Alison's Earth, Uh oh the Spymaster is hot, What happened to the lesbians in London?!, Who DOESN'T wuv Alison really?, You might even say she's mastered the art, and she knows it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:07:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26109184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ModernWizard/pseuds/ModernWizard
Summary: This is the story of how Alison [from my Alison Wonderland series] and the Master [from my Happy Famverse series] meet.The Master, bored out of his skull on Alison's Earth, decides to put on a performance to attract the attention of someone interesting. He's not prepared for Alison, ruler of the universe and the the most amazing human he has ever met.Alison is pissed off that fascists are advertising White nationalism in her town. While she figures out what to do about it, she runs across the Spymaster. She's not prepared for a stupefyingly hot, postcolonialist Time Dork that will severely test her "no banging Time Dorks" rule.
Relationships: Alison Cheney & The Master (Dhawan), Alison Cheney & The Master (Doctor Who), Alison Cheney & The Master (Doctor Who: Scream of the Shalka)
Series: Alison Wonderland [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/710001
Kudos: 2





	1. Matched [The Master]

This universe, the Master concludes, is fuckin’ boring. He has traveled here — to Burlington, Vermont on the Earth in the universe diagonal to his own — seeking a break from his Doctor, along with the four humans of her chosen fam: Yaz, Ryan, Graham, and Grace. It’s not that he hates them. In fact, he rather likes them, particularly his Doctor and Yaz. It’s just that they’re so full of words, words, words — questions, sarcasm, ripostes, anecdotes, tangents, and, of course, puns — that sometimes he can barely hear himselves think. And the Master, who thinks by conversing among four aspects of himselves, needs stillness and peace so that he can hear what he’s saying himselves.

Anyway, he came to this version of Earth in his TARDIS Nychthemeron, looking for tranquility. But this universe’s Earth is just like his. All the things he hates exist here too: the fascism and racism, the ubiquitous surveillance, and the silly gender binary. There is a small difference. The local social media conglomerates aren’t profiling people based on mental health, the way that VOR is back home. Aside from that, however, everything else is the same: crashingly dull.

“Well,” murmurs the Master, sitting up and cracking his knuckles, “aren’t you supposed to be the chaos you want to see in the world? Or maybe it’s  _ change. _ Is it, though? I mean — change is good; it’s the only constant. It’s just that chaos is really, really,  _ really _ good. Fireworks for the soul, really — scares the pants off of you  _ and _ gets your adrenaline pumping. The moment splits open — kapow! — and you look in on your own raw, beating hearts, and you have that lightning strike of knowledge when you just know who you really are. Yeah.” He surveys the room. “This place needs more explosions and exposed organs.” 

He flicks his gaze around the cafe — Whitesmith’s — where he lounges at a wobbly table made from a lacquered slice of tree trunk. With unfinished wooden walls, like the inside of a hunting cabin, and red and black tartan curtains, the place aspires to rustic charm. An unlit stone fireplace, large enough to stand up in, fills the wall opposite the register. The patrons, mostly White kids, students from the local University of Vermont, park before the fireplace in bark-covered rocking chairs, absorbed in the screens of various sleek electronics. The Master might believe more in Whitesmith’s rural quaintness if, first, it was in a town of less than fifty thousand and, second, if he hadn’t just paid fifteen dollars for some ethically sourced, locally ground, sustainably brewed coffee and an organic, cruelty-free, artisanally crafted muffin.

“Oh. Wait. Isn’t skin an organ? Yeah, it is. So we’re actually covered for exposed organs,” he observes. Nearly everyone still wears T-shirts and shorts, for it’s one of those few lazy golden September days before winter falls and, with it, the temperature. “Well,  _ un _ covered. Hah hah! We could sure use some detonations around here, though…”

The Master consults himselves. It’s no secret that his genius brains work differently than most. As someone who frequently narrates and acts out his thoughts, he’s obviously neurodeviant. [He prefers that term over  _ neuroatypical _ or  _ autistic, _ neither of which have the same perverted, transgressive panache of  _ neurodeviant.] _

It is a secret, though, exactly how his brains do their thing. Only two other people, his Doctor and Yaz, know that his is a polyvocal consciousness. He has four main voices in his head, and their interactions constitute his thoughts. The voices aren’t separate selves so much as they’re aspects. To compare himself to one of his steampunk inventions, he in total would be the factotum, the device that does everything. Each of his aspects would equate to a particular function: the communicator, the tissue compression eliminator, the laser screwdriver, and so on. Unlike the Master’s devices, however, his brains perform multiple functions simultaneously at high volume. He labels the aspects just to make the chaos slightly more organized and comprehensible.

_ Soooo,  _ the Master says to himselves,  _ how do I bust up the boredom here?  _ When he’s discussing with himselves like this, he almost always speaks from the perspective of the Postcolonialist. Since his recent reconciliation with his Doctor, they have sworn to live up to the best of their names.  _ The Postcolonialist  _ is the label he gives to the slightly calmer, slightly more analytical, even [gasp!] slightly empathetic person he’s trying to be.

_ Tell ‘em who you really are! _ urges the aspect of himselves that he calls the Purple Tartan Brat on account of his impatient childish mischief.  _ That oughta blow a few minds! _

_ Show them who you really are, _ elaborates the Painful One. That’s the name he gives to the victimized and vengeful aspect of himselves.  _ Unleash your power in all its glory, and compel them to recognize you as their Master. Subjugate them, and they’ll have no chance to hurt you first. _

_ Do something about all the surveillance tech, _ advises the Observer, the aspect who’s always hanging back, watching out, and evaluating for best advantage.  _ I can understand why there would be a cam at the register, but why is there one for each bathroom? Do they arrest you if you go in the wrong one or something? _

“You know what I’m not a fan of?” says the Master conversationally. “Gender policing. Not to mention the fashion police, the secret police, the police state, and fascist enforcers of heteronormative capitalist hegemony. 

“And you know why?” he continues. “Because being bugged bugs me. And you know what I do when I find out I’m being bugged?” Rummaging in his vest pockets, he comes up with a brass-and-glass dragonfly, slightly smaller than life size, and his factotum, both of which he sets on the table before him. “I tend to bug out,” he says, spreading the dragonfly’s translucent wired wings by hand and cranking a few dials on the factotum. The dragonfly’s wings thrum in communication with the control. “ —And make that shit bug the fuck off!” he finishes, piloting his very own bug into the air. The dragonfly makes a silver swoop for the cam over the men’s room. Stinging it with an electric overload, the Master renders the cam a lump of useless metal.

That’s just the first part of his plan to wake up this sleepy little farm town. Now he starts the second. Distributing his psychic power among the thirty or so people in the cafe, he places light, but consistent, pressure on their perceptions. 

He’s only another patron, he suggests, knocking his knees against the pedestal of an uneven table, just like they are. Like them, he finds the late summer sunshine too aggressively filtered by the tartan curtains, while the air conditioning in here is a potential frostbite hazard. He too savors the everpresent dark, burnt aroma of coffee beans. Sadly, the radio, rerunning the same three pop hits at staggered thirty-seven-minute intervals, annoys him as much as them. He blends right in.

Though he directs the perceptions of the cafe crowd away from him, the Master knows that someone, immune to his mental manipulation, will eventually find him out. The impervious ones — the ones both perspicacious and strong-willed — have always intrigued him: Jo Grant, Ada Lovelace, Noor Inayat Khan… Someone like that will see him performing. Then sparks will fly, and the fun will begin...

The glass cafe door opens, rattling the bell attached to the top. A tall woman, with warm red undertones in her middle brown skin, strides in with a long step. She’s in her late twenties or early thirties. A wide, loose corona of cool brown curls stirs around her long, sharp face as she glides toward a table, stepping on the raveling cuffs of her jeans. Her _MAGIC SPACE ROBOTS_ T-shirt black, with a graphic of a robot made of coalescing stars, is thin and stretched out from much love. She sits down, facing him, with only one blank table separating them. 

She unslings a leather rucksack from her shoulder, pulls out a notebook and pen, and begins to write. She writes fluently, embedding her pen point in the paper with each quick stroke. A pale scar near the center of her forehead glimmers like the sparks of her thoughts, uncontainable by her skull. 

What can she be writing that has her so fierce, so focused? He employs some good old-fashioned surreptitious staring, along with acute Time Lord vision, to read her words. It’s a story in simple Latin about two black London lesbian farmers and their run-in with some _ Nazii, _ which is her Latin neologism for  _ Nazis. _

_ Juliana et Livia sunt feminae brunae. Sua patria est Londinium. Habitant in campos pulchris. Sunt agricolae cum villa pulchra. Juliana amat Liviam et vice versa. Vita in Londinium est bona. _

_ Nazii habitant in Londinium. Non amant feminas brunas, sed amant villam Julianae et Liviae. Pugnant Julianam et Liviam suae villae. _

_ Juliana and Livia are black women. Their homeland is London. They live in beautiful fields. They are farmers with a beautiful estate. Juliana loves Livia and vice versa. Life in London is good. _

_ Nazis live in London. They do not like black women, but they like Juliana and Livia’s estate. They fight Juliana and Livia for their estate. _

There’s no more story. The Master rubbernecks in dismay, hoping that perhaps the rest of the text is blocked by her arm, but unfortunately not. Juliana and Livia are battling Nazis, their lives and estate hanging in the balance, and he has no idea what will happen next.

The Master lightens his grip on everyone else’s mind — he’s not shooting anything at the moment anyway, so he really doesn’t need to reroute the patrons’ attention — and sends a question mark of power toward her. Perhaps he can read her thoughts and thus find out more.

The Master’s psychic touch reaches the edges of her consciousness — or where the edges should be if he could find them. Instead he meets a shield upon which his own mind can find no purchase. He slides off. She’s fortified against all mental intrusions with the solidest shields that he’s ever encountered.

At the moment that the Master’s consciousness touches against her boundaries, she raises her head. She glances with narrowed eyes about her. She knows that someone’s trying to connect. How can she tell? He barely brushed her. Shit — she’s not only well-shielded, but also extraordinarily sensitive.

She closes her eyes, sucks in a long breath through her nose, and then — the air splits. The Master’s tendril of consciousness hurtles back into his own head. He grabs the edge of his table for support. It, being unsteady, rocks, and his half-full coffee mug dances on its napkin. Whiplash carries him heels over head out of his chair and backward onto his ass.

The Master blinks and shakes himself. Neon afterimages twinkle in his eyes like he’s just been punched in the nose. Either his ears are ringing, or his brain might still be sloshing around in his cranium, like it does after you’ve had a concussion. She didn’t just swat him lightly aside. No, she dropped a bomb on him, and he feels like a flattened, charred mosquito. Well,  _ someone’s _ a little defensive.

_ Whoa ho ho! _ chortles the Purple Tartan Brat.  _ When you said that this place needed more fireworks, I didn’t think you meant like inside your head. _

_ Fool! _ the Painful One snaps.  _ This is why you should always strike first — to avoid ending up in such a vulnerable position. _

The Master, dimly aware that he’s gaping at her, nevertheless can’t help himself. She’s definitely a human — he doesn’t sense any Time Lord about her — but her psychic powers are something else. The strength of her defenses, the vigilance of her guard, and the force of her repulsion far surpass those of any human he’s met. 

And her mind — such a compelling one, just like those of the others who he couldn’t master. Jo Grant’s brain leapt associatively, quicksilver, intuitive, and playful. Ada Lovelace’s mental strength was a flashing warp and weft, a Jacquard tapestry loomed of propositions and proofs. Noor Inayat Khan’s mind was a layered, stalwart one of camouflage, possible futures, and contingencies. This person now before him has a mind of light and fire, as clear as dawn, as brilliant as noon, as profound as sunset.

_ Yeah, I know, _ agrees the Observer.  _ She’s something else, all right. _

_ She  _ is _ an explosion! _ The Purple Tartan Brat fairly dances. 

_ Keep your guard up, though, _ says the Observer.  _ If she’s that good at detecting telepathy and that impervious to your attempts, she’s not only a natural psychic, but she’s been well trained. Beware of any other mental tricks she might have up her cerebellum. _

A highly trained psychic genius? A worthy opponent? A formidable match? How long since the Master has had one of those? He has Earthling friends, like Yaz and Bill, whose frankness and emotional insight he trusts over his own, but they’re not the same. They’ve never surprised him, been ready for him, or even come close to smacking him on his ass like this one. This one’s new. This one’s exciting.

_ She’s a danger, _ the Painful One corrects him.  _ No human should ever have psychic powers like that — not unless she’s already familiar with Time Lords or another psychic species. She needs to be neutralized before you come any closer. _

_ She’s exactly who I’m looking for! _ the Spymaster cries.

_ Are you insane? _ the Observer says.  _ —I mean beyond your usual dubious level of mental coherence. At least let me calculate the risks first! _

_ That’s it, _ mutters the Painful One.  _ We’re doomed. If anyone wants me, I’ll be in the bunker, trying fruitlessly to shield myself from the inevitably radioactive psychic fallout. _

  
_ This is gonna be so much fun! _ the Purple Tartan Brat crows, and the Master is inclined to agree.


	2. The Mastermind [Alison]

Alison Cheney stalks into Whitesmith’s Cafe, incensed and inspired. It’s less than three weeks after her birthday, and the fascists are in town. White supremacist signs — what a thirty-first birthday present!

Half an hour earlier, on University Green, she came across signs attached to every maple at the edge of the sidewalk. At first she just felt a pang of indignant sympathy for the trees. Here they were, dying so gracefully in their autumnal apparel, and someone gave them puncture wounds with a stapler.

Then she approached. With one hand against the mottled grey maple bark, she read the plain white copier paper:

1st mtg. of the 

WHITE HERITAGE

CLUB

this Sat. 1pm - ?

Our history is the history of CIVILIZATION

Be proud!!!

Alison felt a staple drive into her own gut. A White nationalist group was forming on the very campus where one of her partners, the Magister, worked as a Latin professor. You sort of expected this bullshit in Vermont, which had the dubious distinction of being the Whitest of the United States. But she didn’t have to accept it, not less than two kilometers from where she lived, at the school where her partner worked, on the grounds of an institution supposedly devoted to education, pluralism, and open minds.

“Seriously?” Alison screamed at the sign. “Seriously?!” Peeking around the injured tree, she saw all the others vandalized in the same way. She attacked the sign with both hands, bending her fingernails back, jamming slivers into her skin, until she had shredded the horrible thing off the tree.

Passersby joined in. Just as they turned the last poster in the green into confetti, one of them said that they should have taken photos of the signs and sent them to the local paper. Alison, who never wanted to see anything like that again, even in photos, left in the heat of disgust.

Now, seated at a tippy tree-ring table in Whitesmith’s [because apparently even the businesses are whitey white white around here], she pushes coffee-laden breaths in and out of her nose. She shivers, not just because of the Arctic air conditioning. There are White nationalists walking around Burlington right now. Of course they’ve always been there, but now they’re lurking even more obviously. 

Alison wants to send her Time  ~~ Lords ~~ Dorks after all local White supremacists, herd them into Lake Champlain, and drown them. She has two main superpowered time-traveling aliens at her disposal. There’s the Magister [known as  _ the Master, _ his actual name, to nearly everyone else], the Doctor’s inevitable spouse, who lives here with her. The Magister is married to Alison’s other Time Dork, the Doctor, who lives in London with Alison’s human fiancee Bill. The Doctor and the Magister saved their marriage with separate houses; Alison and Bill enjoy the autonomy and privacy of the arrangement too. 

Anyway, the Time Dorks could easily banish all Nazis from the greater Burlington area. The Magister, a happily domesticated ex-supervillain, would probably do so with spiteful relish. But it’s nearing bedtime for Bill and the Doctor over in London, and the Magister is holding office hours for his students. They’ve got their own lives to lead.

She takes in the scene. The crowd, containing mostly UVM students, is mostly blond, wearing T-shirts celebrating Burlington, the Green Mountains, or the Champlain Valley. Statistically speaking, how many of these people at their laptops think that a neighborhood is bad because it’s predominantly Black? How many of them are freaking out that the White Yankee yoga mums aren’t having enough kids, but the Somali refugee women are having too many? How many of them would join a White Heritage Club?

One other person in the room, an Indian guy two tables down from her, catches her attention. He’s shorter than her, maybe the Magister’s height, slimmer rather than stocky, his brown skin more deeply tanned than the Magister’s gold-tinged complexion. He dresses like the ringmaster of a purple tartan circus, with a tightly corseted waistcoat and trousers cuffed up like he’s going wading. A walking stick, headed with a silver skull, and a top hat rest against his table. 

“You know what I’m not a fan of?” says the guy, cocking his head and narrowing his eyes. He shakes his finger at no one in particular. At first Alison assumes that he’s talking on his phone via earpiece, but no — he’s not talking to anyone. If he’s ringmaster of anything, it might be the circus on his head. “Gender policing. Not to mention the fashion police, the secret police, the police state, and all the fucking fascist enforcers of heteronormative capitalist hegemony!” With each term he enumerates, his voice escalates until he’s shouting at the end. Curiously enough, no one besides Alison appears to register the presence of a cartoonishly dressed carnival barker in their midst. 

“And you know why?” he continues. “Because being bugged bugs me.” He pulls a robotic steampunk dragonfly from his pocket. Did he just produce a visual aid for a pun that he apparently doesn’t have much of an audience for? He did. What a huge fucking dork. He probably laughs at his own jokes and reuses his three favorite puns too. Alison, who does the same and hangs out with a chosen fam of people who do too, suddenly kind of loves him.

She shakes her head. Monologuing weirdos are interesting, but she’s a little preoccupied by racism right now. She whips out pen and paper. Much to her consternation, she charmed the entire UVM classics department when she met them at a holiday party a few years back, and she ended up as a part-time curriculum assistant. Basically she does what she loves for money. She writes fairy tales in Latin so that students can read and translate something more engaging than Caesar tromping around Gaul. In this case, it’s Juliana and Livia, a Black lesbian couple, versus the  _ Nazii _ invading London.

Alison feels a brush against her mental shields. It’s quick and twilight and somehow slightly tartan, though it’s trying its best to be merely a plain, unobtrusive shadow. Someone’s trying to read her mind, and it’s the purple-clad dork two tables away. 

Inquisitive rather than hostile, the tendril of foreign consciousness barely has any force behind it. Nevertheless, Alison’s mind is off limits to strangers. After two nonconsensual mental invasions, she wants no one in her mind except for those that she trusts and permits. She and the Magister developed her shields for this reason: so that she could be safe and whole and happy. 

Alison prepares her defense. She recites her favorite spell, the last two lines of William Ernest Henley’s _Invictus:_ _‘I am the master of my fate; / I am the captain of my soul!’_ she thinks, walloping the mind-reading attempt back whence it came. 

Crash! At the moment Alison releases her blow, the purple tartan dork recoils, flips over the back of his chair, and lands on his ass. Alison flinches, biting her lip in sympathy, but no one else in Whitesmith’s seems to notice. Leaping from her chair, she rushes over. “Shit! Are you okay?”

“Hey!” says the purple tartan dork somewhat breathlessly, his eyes locking on hers. “No no no, I’m not okay. Never have been, never will be. Just call me—” His shoulders ripple in a shrug, his mouth in a sheepish, yet somehow cocky, smirk.  _ “Master.” _ He speaks it with a luxuriant sibilance, as if to speak is to eat his favorite food. “Master of Disaster,” he elaborates. “Ow.” He rubs his elbow.

Even aside from the fascist infestation, Alison now has a threefold problem. First, the guy she just brain punched is… Well, he’s not really a guy. Anyone who has that much fun saying  _ Master _ is just that: some counterpart of her robot’s from elsewhere in the multiverse, a Time Dork of ridiculous power and notoriously questionable morals. Alison’s problem is that, even though he appears innocuous at the moment, she really has no idea of his level of disastrousness.

Second, she pasted him so hard with her psychic defenses that he stares up at her from the floor with incredibly dark, incredibly deep, and incredibly dazed eyes that somehow contain all of twilight at once in his head. Okay, well, it’s actually not really a problem that he’s sprawled on the floor, gazing up at her. He looks nice there.

Third — and this  _ is  _ a problem — he’s hot. He has a long, straight-sided face, rounded at the ends, and there’s somehow  _ more _ of it than most people have. His eyes are cups of brown, flashing with reflected light, and his nose, a generously proportioned triangle, springs forward from the center of his face. His mouth, paler and pinker than the rest of him, isn’t huge, but it is elastic, quivering and curling with his every thought, just like his eyebrows. He has so much, uh, face to make faces with that, in his trembling, unmastered expressions, Alison discovers the truth of who he is. He’s made of love, powered by anxiety, and desperately in search of someone to please. 

Well shit. The alien with the stupid name and the stupid level of psychic powers and the stupidly huge eyes and and the slack expression of adoring stupefaction on his face is stupidly hot.

Or is it  _ stupefyingly  _ hot? Alison’s not quite sure; her internal lexicon seems to have failed her, as it occasionally does when she most needs it. She folds her arms and gives him a scan. If he stays down there for long enough, she might be able to conduct an analysis of his hotness and conclusively determine whether it’s a) stupid, b) stupefying, c) both, or d) other.

“Huh,” she remarks, just to have something to say while she analyzes him.

“Hmmm?” says the Master of Disaster, arching the longest, thickest, and darkest eyebrows Alison has ever witnessed. He lilts up on the sound inquisitively, as if he’s the one who just asked her something. “Ah!” His stupidly long eyelashes, colored dark bluish violet, fan out from his widening eyes. “If you’d just excuse me for a moment —” He cranes his neck, glancing at something behind her. Alison turns her head, and, as she does so, the Disaster Master’s dragonfly whizzes by her ear. It alights on his left hand. With his right hand, he flicks a few dials on a multipurpose device, and the dragonfly’s wings still. He puts the dragonfly and the control back in his pockets.

“What’s the bug for — bugging people?” Alison snorts. Her analysis of the Disaster Master’s hotness has progressed nowhere. She’s too distracted by the way he’s beaming at her, his stupidly lush and curvaceous mouth forming a smile that seems bigger than his head. 

“Oh no! It’s for  _ de _ bugging the bugs that are bugging me. See the cameras over the bathroom doors? Well...you see the smoldering pieces of wreckage that used to be cameras over the bathroom doors? I happen to believe in the right not to be run through an international database every time I sneeze, so I sent my little friend over to electrocute them. And now behold — freedom and privacy!” He flips some of his thick black hair from his face, thrusts his bearded chin forward in satisfaction, and clutches the lapels of his waistcoat. The proprietary pride of the gesture is undiminished by the fact that he’s flat on his back. Oh — he’s not the Disaster Master [though he is a disaster]. He’s the Spymaster!

“Interesting.” Alison lifts an eyebrow. “But you’ve already got privacy. You’ve been talking to yourself and debugging bugs for a while now, and no one’s noticed, not even when you did a backflip over your chair just now. So I have to wonder — exactly how are you making yourself invisible to an entire cafe full of people?” She has an idea of how he’s doing so. If he’s the Master from another universe, which he basically admitted, he must have psychic powers as strong as the Magister’s, which he’s probably using to make himself unnoticed.

“Psychic powers,” he says, echoing her thoughts, “just a little bit of elementary perceptual alteration. You, though — you noticed me.” Propping himself up on an elbow, he points at her. “And now  _ I _ have to wonder — how are  _ you _ clocking  _ me?” _

Right then, Alison decides to mastermind him. He, a Time Dork from another universe, is bored out of his mind. Nevertheless, now that he’s lying at Alison’s feet, he doesn’t seem to mind scrutiny from someone with the talent for being mindful of Masters. And it’s more than a talent; somehow Alison is so masterful at what she does that they don’t even mind being mastered. And now, Spymaster, that’s exactly what I’m going to do to you, if you don’t mind, she thinks. 

He obviously has an inkling that she, who can both repel his mind reading and see through his perceptual control, is no ordinary Earthling, and he wants to know more. She won’t tell him, though. She’ll distract him into explaining himself, while ensuring that he learns nothing about the source of her abilities to master Time Dorks. When she does reveal that, he’ll be so completely masterminded that he might as well be the Magister or Harry or any other Time Dork who accepts her as the ruler of the universe.

“Back up a bit there,” Alison orders him, ignoring his question. “You just said that you have psychic powers and that you’re altering people’s perceptions. Without permission? If you don’t have their permission, you should stop.”

“Oh.” The Spymaster blinks a few times. One eyebrow goes up. Even his nose, which is wonderfully large and triangular, though not as pointed as the Magister’s, flares quizzically. “Yeah.” His eyes flicker upward as he thinks. “You’re right. Are you right? Yeah, you’re right.” He laughs, shaking his head. “You know — here I am, trying to be more postcolonial these days, and I figure that there’s an easy way to do that, right? I just stop making people obey me because I’m the Master, right?” Shrug, bright hopeful smile.

“Uh, that’s one thing you can do to stop,” says Alison, “but I really doubt it’s the only thing.” 

“Exactly! Exactly!” He points at her. “Yes yes yes! Right, right. You can work against the most egregious ways in which they’ve colonized your mind,” he says, pointing to his temples like he might drill into them, “but that doesn’t mean that you get rid of everything. Oh no! There’s always little pieces of internalized oppression — the racism, the sexism, the homophobia, the ableism — ground deep in the grooves of your grey matter, so far down that you don’t even notice. You need something to reach in there and remove it. Like a brainpick! No — wait — that sounds like something you do a lobotomy with. You need like floss or something. Mental floss!” He snaps with both hands, his eyes alight. “Yes, mental floss to remove the mental plaque from your mind before the internalized oppression makes mental cavities and — and — and — yeah.” He sighs, the simile crashing anticlimactically. “I forgot where that metaphor was going, but you’re right.” He nods eagerly at her. “I should stop.” 

“Yeah, you should.” Alison folds her arms at him, though it’s hard to be severe with someone who has such an amazingly quizzical nose. “First of all, I know that you don’t like things done to you nonconsensually,” she says with a significant glance at the scrambled cameras. “And you’re not the only one who feels that way.  _ I  _ feel that way. Everyone else does too. It’s a good idea to respect their privacy too.

“Besides,” she continues, “keeping track of the attention of all these people in the cafe — it can’t be easy, can it?” She knows it’s not. When the Magister and Harry focus their powers on such a scale, they soon exhaust themselves. “Also — you know — you run the risk of being smacked on the ass by people who don’t want their minds invaded.”

The Spymaster’s mouth crumples into a smirk. His eyebrows fold into smug suggestiveness as he says, “Two points, love. First, if you’re familiar enough with mental shielding to have defenses like that, you’ll know that I wasn’t trying to invade your mind. That was like the telepathic equivalent of a wave. You know —  _ Hello? Anyone home?” _ He actually waves in illustration.

“Okay.” Now that Alison thinks about it, she probably did overreact to an innocuous overture. However, it’s always better to be safe than sorry where Time Dorks are concerned, so she has nothing to apologize for. “What’s your other point?”

“Oh. Yeah. Second point — you can smack me on the ass anytime, love. Just try not to knock me out of my chair first, okay?”

Alison is about to say that she’ll aim for the fleshier portion of his ass next time. Then she stops herself. Right then — she’s supposed to be masterminding this disaster of a Time Dork. “So instead of messing with everyone’s minds, why not just relax and talk to me?”

“Wow!” says the Spymaster. “Yeah!” All the sly double entendres fly from his face. His purple-fringed eyes dilate, almost all pupil, and that long face of his lengthens further in a deep, deep smile. He nods small quick nods. “I really, really — I really — I — yeah.” He looks like a cat who has just identified his new person and wants nothing more than to sit on them, bonking them with his head, while purring so hard that he buzzes. “Ah — help me up?” He reaches his left hand up toward her, but she hesitates. “What’s wrong?”

Alison laughs to herself. “I just thought for a moment that you were gonna pull me down to your level.”

He chuckles, his self-consciousness and self-deprecation returning. “Yeah, no, well, there’s always a chance of that when you meet someone new, isn’t there, especially when he’s larking around and calling himself  _ the Master of Disaster, _ huh? But don’t worry, love.” 

“Yeah, no, of course not.” Alison helps him to his feet with a strong jerk.

“I wouldn’t pull you down to my level unless you said you wanted to go there,” he says, now eye to eye with her.

I’m sure being down on your level would be quite interesting, thinks Alison, who’s beginning to suspect that the masterminding is going both ways here.

They sit at the Spymaster’s table. Alison orders tea so that she has something to fidget with if the Spymaster’s stupefying hotness becomes overwhelming. They talk. She asks his name. He, picking up his hat from the table and flipping it in the air so that it lands on his head, tells her to call him  _ O. _ He’s disappointed when she accepts his alias without a blink. He had hoped for some confusion or puns. Alison tells him that names are important aspects of people’s selves that she respects in almost every single circumstance.

The Spymaster nods, noting that people who don’t respect you refuse to call you by your name. Then he goes on a rant about oppressors who strip you of your name and your personhood so they don’t have to think about you as a living, breathing, suffering individual. Suppress your desires so you can obey them. Suppress your emotions so it doesn’t hurt as much to kill over and over and over. Devolve into a mindless, walking weapon. All that your fascist overlords want is a good little soldier, he says. 

_ A good little soldier…  _ Alison guesses that the Spymaster, like the Magister and Harry, fought in his universe’s Time War. It sounds like he, like Harry, was controlled and weaponized against his will. She suspects that his martial metaphors are more than just figures of speech; they’re also fragments of his past.

“And they wonder why we’re angry,” he finishes, punctuating his sentence with a ringing slam of his coffee cup on the table. “Because they’ve stolen our wills, our lives, our hearts, our time, from us! And we have to take it back!” 

Alison backs up slightly from his flailing arms. “By force if necessary, but not like vengefully. We can’t become like them.” She shakes her head. 

“Why not? Meet violence with violence. Punch a Nazi today!” The Spymaster can’t resist a big pointy grin. “Then kick one. Then turn one into Swiss cheese. Granted, it’s not very edible Swiss cheese. High lead content, you know. From all the bullets. But not everything has to be edible to taste so, so, so very sweet. Mmm!” Clenching his fists up by his chin for a moment, he closes his eyes.

Alison waves her hands in placation. “Okay, okay. I’m not legislating anyone’s fascist-killing fantasies.”

“Fantasies?  _ Fantasies? _ Do you know what they—?” His voice rises; one comma of black hair loosens from his slicked-back ‘do and quivers. 

Okay. That was a mistake. Whatever he suffered under some fascist regime — Time Dorks? Nazis? Both? — was no fantasy. Alison hushes her voice. “Whoa, no, sorry. I didn’t—”

The Spymaster unhunches, pushing his lips together. “Okay. Okay. Never mind. I’m good. I’m good.”

Alison, retreating to her tea, has heard very few people speak the way the Spymaster does — with a view of history that intertwines race, gender, and imperialism. Her Time Dorks, including the Stylist, who is very definitely a Black woman and an intersectional feminist and postcolonialist, do on occasion, but the Spymaster is different. Whatever his experiences, he thinks of everything intersectionally and postcolonially, and he does so in all apparent sincerity and passion.

She wonders how the Spymaster changed, analyzing the harms of imperialism and developing empathy. Well, he did cite racism, sexism, ableism, and homophobia as the kinds of internalized bigotry for which he could really use some mental floss. By implication, he’s queer, nonbinarily gendered, and disabled. Perhaps the Spymaster developed a postcolonial perspective when he reincarnated with all those traits and more melanin than previously. 

Then he must have spent time on the Earth in his universe, learning how to parse race, gender, and power with an Earthling vocabulary. Maybe the pivotal event had something to do with fascists? Now Alison has all the more reason to mastermind him and learn his story.


	3. Mastered [The Master]

_ Is it safe yet? Has he stopped begging the Earthling to rub his ears and scratch his belly? _ inquires the Painful One after an hour or so of conversation between the Master and his brilliant interlocutor.

_ For the moment, at least, but that’s just because she’s in the bathroom, _ reports the Observer.  _ Also because he’s probably dreaming about a red leather collar with a bell on it. _

_ Ooooooooh! _ says the Spymaster, widening his eyes..  _ It would be even hotter with a lock on it! She has a key around her neck, you know... _

_ He doesn’t want her just to pet him; he wants her to  _ fuuuuuuuck _ him, _ sings the Little Purple Tartan Brat, drawing out the word mischievously.  _ They were flirting, but she didn’t realize it at first. But anyway she said that they couldn’t be partners because she already had two. And he thought it wouldn’t be a good idea either because he tends to develop really intense feelings about things. So yeah! He totally wants to marry her. _

The Painful One heaves a dramatic sigh.  _ I assume then that he has utterly emptied his reserves of self-respect and circumspection. _

_ Well, not exactly, _ says the Observer.  _ I wouldn’t call it a depletion of reserves. It’s more of a calculated deployment of emotional revelation for the purposes of heightening relational intimacy. They started geeking out about  _ Defenders of Earth,  _ which was innocuous enough, but then he told her that his actual real life was like a  _ Defenders _ episode —  _

_ Why? For fuck’s sake, you’re not the Postcolonialist. You’re the Postintellectualist. Do you have any functioning critical thinking skills at all? _ cries the Painful One.

_ As a matter of fact, I do, contrary to popular belief! _ the Spymaster retorts.  _ From the way that she reacted to my psychic powers, I had an intuition that she might be familiar with Time Lords. So I told her that I was one to see what kind of reaction I’d get. _

_ And she just nodded and smiled, _ says the Observer proudly,  _ and said,  _ Tell me about your Doctor.  _ She’s  _ definitely _ a companion, but one of the enlightened ones — you know, like Yaz.  _

_ Also, before you start screeching at me again, _ the Spymaster cuts in over the Painful One’s indignant huff,  _ yes, I  _ did  _ tell her how my Doctor and I got together.  _

He told his brilliant interlocutor how his Doctor was chasing him down during the Kasaavin debacle mere months ago. His Doctor found him in Paris, 1943, where he was hiding amongst the Nazis, thanks to a perception filter that made them think that he looked like them. The Master had grown up amongst Space Fascists, practicing temporal cleansing rather than ethnic cleansing, cosmic colonialism instead of merely continental. Thus Earth Nazism felt like home.

But his Doctor had betrayed him. His beloved Doctor, the one that he had always trusted to be better than him, had broken his perception filter. She turned him into Disposable Brown Guy #3 and abandoned him to the Nazis.

That was the Master’s first postcolonial moment. That was the instant when he realized the effect of Nazism, fascism, imperialism, any type of systemic oppression, whether on Earth or Gallifrey. Any division of the world into  _ us, _ the superior ones, and  _ them, _ the inferior ones, made it easy to see the other as a threat, an enemy, someone to get rid of. It was so easy to hate the others — and then yourself — and then your friends. And that was how the people you trusted turned on you.

The Master decided to destroy all the Time Lords on Gallifrey. The innocent regular Gallifreyans would remain, but the Time Fascists and their oppression would be gone. He brought a future Cyber legion back to the present and told them to massacre all the Time Lords. [He didn’t make the Cyber people himself. After having been a mind-controlled soldier in the Time War and, more recently, a fighter with Bill Potts against Cyber oppression on  _ Newland, _ a Mondasian colony ship, he couldn’t confiscate people’s freedom like that. In response to his brilliant interlocutor’s objection that he was supposed to be  _ un _ oppressive and postcolonialist, the Master told her that it was a process.]

Gallifrey devolved into civil war. Despite orders to kill only Time Lords, the Cyber legion annihilated everyone. Regular Gallifreyans defended their planet. When the Doctor arrived to halt the Master’s latest disaster, she witnessed the regular Gallifreyans turning on the remaining Time Fascists themselves. The Master and his Doctor fled to the citadel in the capital city, but it collapsed, and they were trapped under rubble for three days.

With nothing else to do, the Master and his Doctor talked. They talked about the regular Gallifreyans’ justified rage at the Time Fascists, and they talked about their own. Even as renegades, they realized, they had spread their own fascist indoctrination across the universe. The Master had become a master of colonizing and controlling minds. His Doctor had become a master of colonizing and controlling hearts, evoking people’s sincere love and then abusing it by forcing them to suffer for what she thought was right. They were perpetuating the oppression that had been practiced on them. They had even weaponized their Space Fascism against one another, coming to hate each other, despite their love.

Sick of hatred, the Master and his Doctor decided to try coexisting without doing violent things to each other [unless under certain consensual circumstances]. They would watch one another closely and hold each other accountable in their endeavors to be respectful, thoughtful, kind, and generally antifascist. They would live up to the best of their names — the Doctor a healer of pain, the Master a ruler of wisdom.

The Master’s brilliant interlocutor had listened to all of this with an unblinking, analytical focus, a serious wrinkle stitched between her eyebrows. Then she asked him why he had told her that.

Because I want you to love me, the Master had thought, but I know that you love truth and kindness and respect more, so I will give you the truth and hope that it’s enough.

_ If you said that, _ says the Painful One,  _ I am going to secede from your brain, find another body, activate it, and clobber you with an aubergine until you come to your senses. _

_ Relax, _ says the Spymaster.  _ I just said that I wanted her to know what kind of person she was dealing with. _

_ And was she suitably impressed, _ says the Painful One acidly,  _ with your thoroughly seductive litany of Nazism, Space Fascists, genocide, and civil war with bonus self-pity? _

The Observer snorts.  _ Not at all. She sort of narrowed her eyes and said that she hoped that he understood now why the master’s tools could never dismantle the master’s house. I  _ like _ her. She’s got a sharp sense of humor, that one. Anyway, then he nearly had a nerd-gasm and started asking her what she thought of Audre Lorde. But she had to go to the washroom, so here we are. I wonder what she thinks of Lorde’s theory on —  _

_ Hey! Swipe her phone! _ suggests the Purple Tartan Brat.  _ She left it right there.  _

_ Yes! Please! _ says the Painful One.  _ Let’s at least  _ try  _ to salvage some modicum of advantage from this wretched encounter. _

The Master focuses on his brilliant interlocutor’s phone across the table from him. If he needed any more evidence that she was a companion or some sort of Time Lord affiliate, the sound of an incoming text proves it. The alert noise, a protracted mechanical gasp, is precisely the racket that his Doctor’s TARDIS Diva makes when she materializes.

He pulls his factotum from his pocket, nearly dropping it in his haste. Besides neutralizing surveillance cams, piloting steampunk bugs, shrinking things to one-sixth of their size [very convenient for his interest in miniatures!], and that sort of thing, his factotum also copies information from others’ devices to his. He flicks a lever, thumbs a crank, points the business end at his brilliant interlocutor’s phone, and — 

—And the Master barely starts downloading when his brilliant interlocutor exits the bathroom. He jumps, drops his factotum, shuts it off, jams it into his pocket, and waves at her as she approaches. “Hello, love! Your phone was wheezing. Either it’s about to give up the ghost, or you’ve just gotten a text.”

“Mm,” she says. She meets his eyes for a moment and then tucks a small smile in the corner of her mouth. She left her phone that purposely, he realizes. knows that he looked at her phone. As a matter of fact, she purposely left it there so that he would. She probably didn’t even need to use the bathroom; she was just giving him a chance to play the Spymaster.

Without sitting down, she picks up her phone and scans the message. Her long hooked eyebrows pop up and then squinch down. “Fuck! Listen — it’s been great talking to you, but I have to go.”

She can’t leave! She has to stay! “But— I— Wait! No!” In his dismay, the Master loses his ability to form coherent sentences. He has to ask her — what? He can’t think of anything to say. “Why—? What —? Who are —? Wait! But what happened to the lesbians from London?” His mouth comes out with a question that he didn’t even know was on his mind.

“The what?”

“Juliana and Livia — the ones you were writing about.  _ Occupantne Nazios?” Do they overcome the Nazis? _

_“Ferro et igni!”_ His brilliant interlocutor confirms with a smirk of vindictive satisfaction. _“Et populus brunus est laetus, et vita in Londinium est bona.”_ _With fire and sword! And the black population is overjoyed, and life in London is good again._ And she exits, this time with a bounce in her long, swinging stride.

_ What happened to the lesbians from London?! _ the Painful One repeats.  _ What happened to the lesbians?!  _ That’s _ the only thing you could think to ask the mere  _ human _ to whom you’ve just spilled your entire life story without any regard for your personal safety? Who  _ cares _ what happened to the fictional lesbians? What’s going to happen to you? _

_ He’s gonna fall in loooooove with her, _ says the Purple Tartan Brat in a singsong.

_ He already is, _ points out the Observer.  _ He’s called her nothing but _ love, _ and we know he only reserves that term for the people he’s closest to, like his Doctor and Yaz and...well, whoever this person is. _

“Everyone, just shut up and fuck off!” the Master snaps, opening up his factotum. “I’m reading!”

Unfortunately, his factotum only pulled a single text — the most recent — from his brilliant interlocutor’s phone. It’s from someone called  _ the Magister. _

_ Student reports “white club” signs on Redstone Campus, _ it begins. Several angry cat face emojis follow, but, unlike the standard ones, these have aerials sticking out of the points of their ears.  _ I’m in my office for another 47 minutes, so might you have time to destroy fascism, mea Domina carissima atque obsequentissima? In any event, I shall prevail upon my Doctor as well. _

Is that her name —  _ Domina? _ If so, how fitting, for it means  _ ruler, leader, master, _ all of which she certainly is.

If she is so masterful, then perhaps she isn’t just Domina, but  _ the  _ Domina. The Master never sensed anything of the Time Lord about her, but that doesn’t mean that she isn’t like him. Perception filters, chameleon arches — there are countless ways for his kind to disguise themselves. It’s perfectly plausible that this universe contains means that he doesn’t know about. Has he been masterminded then by the Master in this universe? He rather thinks that he has.

“Oh Domina, Domina, Domina,” the Master murmurs, shaking his head. “Domina  _ carissima,  _ love… There are so many delightfully deviant things I’d like to do to you, if only I knew how to find you.”

He stands stock still for a moment. Then he cries, “Ah hah! Ah hahahahahahah! I know how to find you! Of course I do.” It’s very simple, really. He could just send his steampunk dragonfly out looking for her, but that wouldn’t be any fun, especially not when he has a text full of juicy clues right here.

With the Internet via wifi stolen from Whitesmith’s, the Master deduces much from the mysterious Magister’s message. He assumes that it’s from a male teacher, since that’s what  _ magister _ is in Latin, who teaches at whatever school has a Redstone Campus. The Internet says that the only possibility is the University of Vermont, so the Master checks various departmental websites. He suspects that the Domina is conversing with a classics professor, but he searches throughout the humanities anyway, seeking faculty members who are holding office hours right this very minute.

He dismisses candidates in art history and world history because there’s a Latin professor whose name stops him cold: Maximilian Victor Magister, PhD. Despite what he thought earlier about the Domina, the Master knows — he just  _ knows  _ — that Maximilian Victor Magister, PhD, is his counterpart in this universe. The Master has found the Master.

He reads the Magister’s last sentence again:  _ In any event, I shall prevail upon my Doctor as well. _ The Magister [which is what the Master is calling him for simplicity’s sake] and this Doctor appear to both cooperate and support antifascism. Maybe they get along as well as the Master and his Doctor do. Are they partners? Ah yes. That possessive —  _ my Doctor _ — says they are.

Then what about the Domina? The Master assumed that she was his counterpart in this universe, but that’s manifestly untrue. The Magister is Master here, and the Domina is, as he addresses her, his  _ dearest and most obedient. _ Are the Domina and the Magister partners? They would indeed make a perfect match of mastery.

The Master reflects. He thinks of how confidently the Domina manipulated him, which means that she has a deep, intimate familiarity with how people like him work. He remembers too how quickly she answered the Magister’s summons, which suggests that she dearly loves and respects him. Obviously the Master isn’t the only Master that the Domina has mastered, for the Magister is hers just as much as she is his.

“Why, Professor Thascalos,” says the Master with a chuckle, “I do believe that you, like me, may have found yourself a whole fucking  _ fam.” _ He consults his factotum’s chronometer; Professor Thascalos’ office hours are still running. A good thing, because the Master wants to ask him some questions.

A short bus ride later, the Master ascends to the third floor of UVM’s classics department building, a truly ridiculous Victorian. Three stories, nobly proportioned, and pale yellow, it’s a fairy-tale castle trying to pass itself off as a converted dwelling, but it cannot divest itself of its grandeur. In other words, it’s the architectural equivalent of a Master, and naturally the Magister has claimed the third-floor tower room, topped with a slightly onion-shaped dome, as his domain. 

The Master listens at the six-paneled slab of a door and hears no students in the Magister’s office. He raps smartly with the skull on the head of his walking stick, then flings the door open, greeting his counterpart like an old friend: “Master! Hi!” Sweeping his top hat from his head, he executes a bow.

“Ah! A command performance, my fellow player, but there’s really no need to stand on ceremony.” The Magister’s voice rolls about him in a warm measure of orotund syllables. Why does he sound so familiar?

The Master understands when he rises from his obeisance. The Magister looks like the Master’s first incarnation. He’s slightly shorter than the Master himself and stocky, his skin a sepia shade that, on Earth at least, originates in the Mediterranean. Clad in layered robes of greys and charcoal purples, he seems to be a wizard who has coalesced from cloud. The only parts of him visible are his head — dominated by deep-set brown eyes and a prodigious nose — and his hands. 

But the Magister is not quite the same as the Master’s first self. As the Magister glides around his desk, his eyes brighten with amber sparkles. A smile unfolds beneath his goatee [which is, of course, black with two precise white stripes on either side of the mouth]. He beams upon the Master with a genuine goodwill that the Master never had in his first life. The Master stares.

“Please — come in — sit down.” The Magister spreads his hands in welcome. Forged of silver metal and electronics, they glow purple at the tapered fingertips. Clasping the Master’s hands, the Magister draws him forward to a chair in front of the desk. The Master continues to stare.

When his rear connects with the seat cushion, the Master finally thinks of something to say. “Okay. Wow. The Domina  _ carissima atque obsequentissima _ told you I was coming, huh?”

The Magister, settling back behind his desk, nods once. “You read my text to her, I presume. I should inform you that, while that is  _ my _ name for her, it cannot be yours.”

The Master’s ears heat up. He blew in here, hoping to ambush the Magister and disarm him, because it’s always nice to have the advantage over strangers. Yet this version of the Master is as imperturbable as the Domina. He presides over his office with the ease of someone who rules by right. It would be kind of enviable if he weren’t so fucking smug about it. “Oh. Sorry. Sorry — I didn’t realize it was more like a nickname. So, uh, what’s her actual name?”

“She didn’t tell you?” The Magister cocks his head.

“Uh, no…”

“Then I will leave it to her to do so when she wishes. But you… You disclosed to someone your true identity, origin, and powers, as well as the salient points of your psychoautobiography,  _ without _ knowing her name?” The Magister’s eyebrows swoop up on his wrinkled forehead, and his whole face crinkles with a laugh. “Oh ho ho, my clever Domina! She truly  _ has _ enchanted you most completely, hasn’t she?” His fingertips flare golden as he brings his hands together in a clap of joy. A sound crackles about him: a quiet, steady, satisfied trill.

Is the Magister purring, like actually  _ purring, _ with glee? Fuck him! “Oh yeah?” the Master sneers. “Well, she’s done the same to you. You wouldn’t call any human  _ Domina _ unless you’d been masterminded too. I’m not the only one,” he says, stabbing a finger at his own chest, “who hasn’t been minding my matter… I mean — being mindful of my mind,  _ Master! _ She’s as much the master of  _ your _ mind as she’s the master of minding… I mean — the mindfulness of mattering. I mean — the mattering of matterfulness. I mean — I mean —” He flaps his hands in his face, then spits out, “Never  _ mind _ what I mean! You’re the fucking Master; you  _ know _ what I mean.”

“Oh!” exclaims the Magister in surprise. He stops purring. “My apologies.” 

The Master has never, ever heard a Time Lord apologize who wasn’t his Doctor. “You apologies? I mean — you apologize? Why?”

“I do know what you mean, and I did not mean to mock you when I said that she had enchanted you.” 

“You didn’t?”

“No. I’m sorry. I was laughing out of solidarity, for you are not the first Master that my Domina  _ carissima _ has...well...mastered. I was the first, followed by the Master from my Domina’s inevitable fiancee’s universe, and now you are the third.”

“Solidarity?” the Master repeats. The Magister nods, and a wry, self-conscious smile appears on his face. He’s telling the truth. “Yeah. Solidarity,” says the Master again, realizing it. “So you — she — you — you’re the Master, and she mastered  _ you?” _

“It is a mutually agreeable obedience, to be sure,” says the Magister, his smile becoming fond. 

“Wait...this is something she does regularly? Serially? Intentionally?”

“Yes, of course.” The Magister, purring again, folds his beautiful unskinned hands before him on his blotter. “My dearest and most obedient Domina has the highest and most exacting standards for personal and interpersonal conduct. She believes that everyone should be as insightful, as kind, as compassionate, as thoughtful, as respectful, and as fair as she. She will countenance no opposition, for this is how she knows that the universe must be run. You know what I mean, right?”

The Master sits back in his chair. No, the Magister doesn’t want to gloat or lord it over him at all. He just wants to welcome the Master to the elite club of Time Lords who are completely dopey for love of the Domina. The Master can handle this. “Yeah, and she’s the ruler of the universe, all right!” he says with a laugh. “I swear — she told me to stop using my psychic powers on everyone in Whitesmith’s, and it was just like...I had to. She didn’t force me. She didn’t even lecture me or raise her voice. As a matter of fact, she just said it calmly, like a casual remark, like,  _ Oh yeah, everyone knows that. _ She said it like it was the truth, and then it hit me that it  _ was _ the truth; I  _ should _ stop. So I did — because I had to — because she’d just shown me the truth. Also because she probably would have kicked me out if I hadn’t.”

“Indeed, she would have. —Anyway, though, my Domina is a master of goodness, respect, and empathy. And there is something in our natures — in mine and yours — that responds to that.”

“Well, you know…” confesses the Master. “I always did like to meet my match. I just never thought it would be anyone except my Doctor.”

“Precisely!” The Magister’s eyes light up, as do his fingertips: ten magenta glimmers of excited commiseration. He bends across his desk to speak more closely. “Whoever thought that a human would regard us without fear, as an equal, as a friend?”

“Oh! Yeah! Yeah!” The Master mirrors the Magister’s posture. “Not someone to condemn or pity or glorify, but just another person, someone that she expects better of.” The Master grins, for the Magister knows what he’s talking about; he understands. He too knows exactly why you can’t help loving the Domina. She is made of light, a strong, fine, brown brilliance, and that light illuminates everything. All doubt and confusion are burnt away, leaving only the truth: You will do anything to please her, if only so that she will glow upon you again and you can feel her warmth, her light, her strength, from the insides of your hearts out. 

“And I,” says the Magister, withdrawing with a sigh, “who have an accurate and deserved reputation for past cruelty, unkindness, objectification, and sadism across the universe, even with my Doctor, find that expectation —”

“Freedom,” the Master finishes promptly and softly. “A freedom to which I would happily submit.”

Right on cue, the Domina sails in without a knock. “Hey,  _ mi Magistre!” _

“Domina!” The Magister sits up like a cat whose owner has appeared, and his entire attention swivels away to her. The two of them shine so fiercely at each other that the bond between them nearly becomes visible as an endless ray of infinite, doubly reflected light. Mutual mastery indeed. The Master swallows a sob. They love each other so much that he feels like crying.

“Oh hi, Spymaster.” The Domina sends a much less intense, but still scintillating, flash of light his way with her casual smile. “Glad to see you caught up with one another.”

“What’s your  _ name?” _ the Master bursts out. “—Because apparently only  _ he  _ can call you  _ Domina.” _

“I’m Alison — Alison Clarabella Cheney,” she says, “but you can call me…” She thinks for a moment. “Call me  _ Alison.” _

“Oh,” says the Master. “I… Uh… Yeah… Wow.” He tests her name on his tongue: “Alison.” No, that’s not right, and, as both he and she concurred earlier, calling people by the right names is very important. “Love,” he says, and that’s right. “You — I — you’re brilliant, love.”

“If you two are just sitting around, chatting,” says Alison, striding briskly to the Magister’s desk, “that means that you,” she says to the Magister, “don’t have any more students to meet with, which means that both of you can help me bin fascist propaganda. It’s going up faster than one person can rip it down. And if  _ you,” _ she says, eyeing the Master pointedly, “have a devious device that controls steampunk bugs and  _ hacks people’s phones, _ I’m sure you have something in your pockets that can vaporize racist posters. C’mon.” She leaves with the swiftness of someone accustomed to being followed.

“And so now,” says the Magister with a twinkle in his eye, rising from his desk, “I trust that you understand how my dear Domina runs this universe.”

  
The Master laughs. He stands on his toes and claps. “Yeah, I’ve been masterminded by the master of mastering Masters, and I  _ love _ it!”


End file.
